How the web has changed

In mid-1997 I took delivery of my first PC from a friend – a speedy 486, with 8MB RAM and a whopping 1MB Orchid graphics card. (Oh, and Windows 3.1) A couple of other friends, and a quick mail order, contributed my first ever upgrades: an extra 16MB RAM, a processor upgrade to a DX2 66 (which I, at one point, overclocked to 100Mhz), a Reveal CDROM+SoundCard combo (nasty) and, most importantly, a US Robotics Sportster Winmodem – 33k, but firmware upgraded to 56k. A quick visit to Freeserve and I was on the internet.

OK – so this wasn’t my first encounter with the internet, but, nostalgia aside, it’s very interesting to think back to those times, and what the internet was at that point, and where it is now.

Back then the killer feature was probably email – everyone at university had email addresses, and with the advent of local-rate ISPs more and more people were getting online with email. Lots of people had “homepages” – usually a page with a horrible wallpaper, and a little sign saying ‘under construction’. Some of the big companies had webpages – ibm.com just celebrated its 10th anniversary – but none of the little ones did. The big search engine was Yahoo; Google was but a mere glimmer in its creators’ eyes. Webmail was barely in existence – hotmail was on the rise, but, IIRC, wasn’t owned by Microsoft at that point.

So, what did _I_ use the internet for? Well, I downloaded some freeware, and stuff like that. (I was a big fan of Calmira for a long while) I read a lot of stuff, too, I suppose. I did a bit of HTML work, but nothing really serious. But, to be honest, I don’t remember it being a big part of my computer experience at that point.

Fast forward to the present – all of 7 years later – and now look at the net: it’s the first port of call before buying many purchases, and, for me at least, I do more shopping on the net than anywhere else. It has become a vital source of information – cinema times, maps, news, sport. It has become a vast community of people (“netizens”?). Most people are connected to the net, and an increasing number have broadband, ‘always on’ connections. Instant messaging has become prevelent, as has ‘blogging’. Interestingly, I would say that _less_ people have homepages, but that the overall quality has risen as a result. Google, who for me took over from Yahoo as my preference somewhere in 1998, is still the search engine by which others are judged. Netscape died and resurrected itself via the Mozilla project, finally giving us the cutting edge product that is Firefox. Amazon revolutionised online shopping, as did eBay. MP3s arrived, along with online music stores. Video over the net is getting there, and VoIP (Voice over IP) is on the brink. Online gaming is bigger than ever.

And me? It’s definitely my primary source of information on any topic. I shop online. Email is still important, but has been joined by IRC, Forums and IRC as places where I meet and chat with people. Email, in many ways, is personal communication with certain people that I know. Whereas 7 years ago my primary sources of software were shops and magazine CDs, the internet now takes that place. It was certainly one of the main things that aided my move to Linux – at the point where I was able to get online in Linux, I ceased to need Windows for anything other than games, which were only a minor part of my computer usage.

So – after all this rambling – can we learn anything? Can we predict where the internet is going to go? Here are some thoughts:

Desktop integration – more and more I believe that the internet is going to simply become part of our basic computer experience. This is eased by broadband, but I believe that things like remote storage will become more and more common. ‘Any machine’ experience – many companies are interested in ‘hot desking’ and home working. Eventually this will have knock on effects in the ‘home’ market too – use any machine, but have the same desktop experience. Media streaming – as speeds get better, why bother going down to Blockbuster when you can just stream the video direct to your TV? VoIP is going to be big business soon, I reckon. Things like SIPhones and Skype are the tip of the iceberg. As I’ve mentioned in a previous prediction, I think that video-casting via RSS is going to kick in (for those than can afford the bandwidth ) and we will begin to see independent TV shows, much like the radio shows we see now IPv6 – version 6 of the Internet Protocol. For those of you less technically inclined than myself – when you type in an internet URL like www.jedimoose.org, it ‘resolves’ into a numeric address (like a kind of postcode for an internet address) which allows your computer to find the computer on which the information is stored. Currently, with IPv4, this consists of 4 different numbers in the range of 0-255 (eg 255.132.64.1). Problem is that we are running out of these, and things like VoIP doesn’t help. IPv6 replaces the 4 numbers with 6, which gives millions of more combinations. Converting everything over to IPv6 is a big job, but it is going to happen, and businesses will be pushing for it to be soon.

I leave you with a question – will the internet always be the way it is now, only ‘better’ or will it ever become some thing unrecognisable from the form it is in now. I’ve become a reasonably avid reader of Tom Clancy’s (spin-off) “Net Force” series, which suggests that the ‘browsers’ of the future are, in fact, Virtual Reality, and that we can shape the browsing experience to match our own personal preferences. Anybody got a glimpse of the internet in 2012?

mrBen